The civil service needs management training
The civil service offers no generic business management training. That is a disgrace.
The civil service offers no generic business management training. This is despite having quite a lot of people who are in the profession of management. If the civil service is going to recognise it’s in the business of management, it could do worse than starting by actually letting people train in that if they want to.
I started my career on the Local Government Associations National Graduate Development Programme. It was sort of developed to be a local government rival to the Fast Stream, taking the best recent grads and giving them two years of rotational job training in a single local authority, underpinned by centralised training bootcamps and online courses that lead to a level 7 (masters level) qualification in Leadership and Management. Sadly I joined the civil service before I actually got this qualification, but I did all of the classroom and online training associated with it. That training was tailored to the specifics of the local government sector, but covered all the bases of what I would call ‘management’ - especially business or organisational management as opposed to people or line management. It covered how finance, governance, business planning, procurement, contract management, HR, strategy/policy/design all fit together to make an organisation work effectively. The sort of content covered in an MBA degree.
When I started the scheme, I assumed these courses would be tedious and useless because most training courses are sadly like that. Plus I had just come straight out of university. I liked lofty ideas about philosophy, science and history, not humdrum stuff like budget planning cycles. However I found that this was not only interesting, but an incredibly useful foundation for every future job I would have. It is really helpful when working within a large organisation to have some theoretical basis for how that organisation is supposed to work and what all of its parts do. It’s also very useful for helping understand how policy will be implemented, and how the operational arms of government or the regulated private organisations will respond to policy.
I recently started a new role reviewing an arms-length body. More so than most ‘policy’ roles, this requires a good grounding in organisational management. My junior reports didn’t have directly relevant training or experience, which I didn’t see as a problem, as I thought there would be a wide variety of business management courses on the civil service learning platform, which after all has hundreds or maybe thousands of courses. I think I looked pretty thoroughly. So did they. We couldn’t find a single course that proposed to teach all the generic tools of business management in one coherent whole. There were a few elements of it, especially finance, but these were often addressing specific aspects of finance rather than a strategic overview. Procurement and contract management were almost the same - you can have a trivial overview or obscure specifics. I couldn’t find anything on governance. BEIS runs a management course, but that is for line managers, it does not cover business management. I’m left with either sending my colleagues on a patchwork quilt of introductory courses, or sending them on a programme management course and hoping enough of the theory and tools apply to organisations more generally. Neither is particularly appealing.
This is not just about my obscure need. Whilst of particular relevance to my current role, an understanding of management is essential to any policy civil servant, and especially any who are of management grade. If there’s special training aimed at senior civil servants, then this is too late. You need people to understand things from the start, not retroactively try to get them to rethink things once they’re officially senior managers. Policy officials are all in some sense managers within complex organisations, and very frequently responsible for advising on decisions that have huge impacts on such organisations. Most policy officials will at some point have to deal with finance and commercial professionals, be involved in setting up governance and decision-making bodies, oversee the performance of operational teams or organisations. In BEIS I would estimate at least 50% of junior policy officials need one or more of these things as part of their regular work. In order to do any of these jobs properly, policymakers need a proper understanding of how large organisations work. You cannot work in one of the country’s largest, most complex organisations with no theoretical grounding in how such organisations work and what their different parts are supposed to do.
We would never think of letting an engineer design a building without having an understanding of the basics of mechanics and civil engineering.1 Professionals like doctors and lawyers often need years of formal training before they’re even allowed to independently practice. And yet the civil service, and other organisations, seem to think it’s OK to recruit people into management roles without teaching them anything about how organisations are managed. I’m not asking for a 5 year degree, just at least a 5-day course!
I’m not naive enough to believe that sending people on a 5-day course early in their career will mean they instantly understand everything better. There are plenty of qualified project managers who don’t seem to really understand the different elements of project management, despite going on the course and passing the exam. But at least they’re given a chance, and expected to know certain things. Policy officials are allowed to stay in denial about being managers, and we’re not even offered management training if we want to go on it.
BEIS used to have a 5-day introduction to policy course that most policy officials went on when they joined, because it was excellent (they’ve since replaced it with a different, pandemic-friendly course that I hope is equally good). We recognise that people new to policy need a grounding in fundamentals early on to understand how their small role fits into a bigger picture. However, a decent number of people probably join the policy profession because they have an interest in policy. Many probably already have a good idea of the policymaking process and how it fits together, although the course is far from obsolete. Most people do not join the policy profession because they have an interest in management. Yet it’s just as important as policymaking to the role of policy professionals, especially if we’re going to keep the policy profession as a fairly broad ‘generalist’ tent. I actually worry the desire to turn generalists into ‘policy professionals’ is counterproductive to this point. Those previously called generalists are just as much managers as they are policymakers. They need both skills in roughly equal amounts, although it will vary depending on the job role.
I don’t just think this is a problem for training junior staff. It affects the way the entire civil service communicates. I have occasionally struggled in conversations with more senior and experienced civil servants who need me to explain terms or concepts that should be common knowledge to any manager. I’m not bragging about my amazing knowledge here - this was taught in the first year of my graduate scheme. Fundamental concepts have not filtered through into the collective understanding of civil servants. This isn’t entirely the fault of training - if the concepts were applied better and more consistently across the civil service, they would be common knowledge. But teaching people the basics can hardly hurt. I would love to see senior civil servants encouraged to do MBAs in the same way they are encouraged to do Public Policy masters degrees.
I originally wrote the above comments about senior managers not getting management, before I read this blog from earlier today by Jonathan Mills, Director General in DWP. He describes what he thinks a policy official actually does. I quite like his description that “fundamentally, they do their jobs by bringing other types of professional together and making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.” And yet, he can’t bring himself to call this what it is - a description of being a manager. Instead he decides to coin a sexier phrase and calls it being an ‘orchestrator’, which I can’t help feel is just a synonym for ‘manager’. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel around some new type of professional orchestrator, maybe we should try borrowing from the hundred or so years of expertise and theory that has developed around the management profession. Thank you, Jonathan, for underlining my point that the idea of management simply isn’t in the vernacular of civil service policymakers.
So I hope someone makes the effort to pull together an accessible introduction to civil service management. I think a civil service genuinely dedicated to reform would be mad not to. I would happily help do this. If I thought I would be allowed to.
P.S. If I’m an idiot and there’s actually a really great course just like this, please do tell me.
But we would let an architect design a building with no understanding of mechanics. Am I right, engineers?